I said, “Are you sure you’re not mistaken? This is all a great surprise to me.”
She did not hear, for she was calling her husband.
“Stepan, Stepan, come now when I call you. It is Dr Field, the famous art-collector. He would like to see your pictures!”
At this point Charles Hodd interposed and carried us off to his own house.
I said, “What a gifted woman!”
Sophie said with joyful venom,
“No lie, no coincidence, no fantastic connection is big enough to choke her, no moment too fleeting for Nina to sell something in it!”
Charles was furious:
“Sophie, we should like some tea. We have not much time to drink it and get up the hill.”
Someone began calling Sophie through the window; she said,
“It is Nina!” and went to the window and shouted,
“Nina, I am busy: wait till I come down.”
The voice came again,
“Dr Field! Dr Field!”
I opened my eyes in amazement, and laughing, went to the window.
“Dr Field, do you want to pop over a minute, while Sophie is making the tea? Our gallery is very known. Picasso came to see it. Some of the artists are particular, of course: you have to go to their houses to see their pictures, but we have a lot of authentic ones left under certain conditions. Ours to dispose of at any price: a bargain, I assure you—” and she named a number of known and unknown painters.
She spoke very loudly and again the indescribable emotion took hold of the shutters, window-curtains and doors of the cottages. The village was all ears. Stepan, who had lingered in the watchmaker’s shop, came sturdily towards us, flushed a little in his haste. He said something to Nina, and after hesitating, she waved her fat little hand gaily and went with her husband, Stepan, into her own house.
Yet before we had finished tea she had run into the Hodds’ great paved living-room where we were sitting, saying,
“Charles, they say you just got a big letter from your publishers: I hope it’s good news!”
“Yes, thanks,” said Charles.
“Is there anything the post-office doesn’t tell you, Nina?” said Sophie, pleasantly.
Nina said, “Sure, Sophie, don’t get cross. You’re all nervous today to your friends. I hope Charles got the big contract with Steele & Steele.”
“He did,” replied Sophie, “a $1,000 contract and $250 advance without putting pen to paper. We can pay the plasterer, thank goodness.”
“Ai, I’m so glad of that, Sophie! He told me this morning it’s a bit long to wait: his wife’s sick and the Bibbets moved out today and the Watsons last week without paying him. I told him, Sophie, that Charles is not like an ordinary workman, he doesn’t get regular money, but he gets a lot all at once.”
“Leave him to us, Nina, can’t you,” shrieked Sophie.
“Dear, dear,” said Charles, and put his hand to his silver plate.
Nina Nyiregyhaza looked a little startled, and after an agreeable word or two, ran out of the house again.
We looked round the great room on the first floor of the cottage. The stone walls were newly-plastered, white and clean. The several low square windows had leaded panes. There were no curtains, but the woodwork was painted red. A great family bed stood in an alcove: copper saucepans, a candlestick, a large three-legged pot, a stool, a child’s divan and a large packing-case turned into a dresser, completed the furniture of the room. Outside, in the stone entry, a staircase led up to Charles’s workroom, furnished with a table, a chair and two sets of unpainted shelves. This was their home, the idyllic retreat which they had so often described to their friends in their letters, the charming, snug content that appeared in their several articles. The afternoon sun flooded the white-walled village street, where cats strayed over the vile-smelling gutters. Around the blue peaks rose shining: through a break in the hills, the great fertile plain appeared. Charles followed our glances and smiled,
“It is lovely, isn’t it? People come here from every corner of the earth!”
Sophie, who was making toast over the fire, looked down into the village street and laughed to herself,
“Do you know, they say that Nina puts out saucers of milk for every cat in the village and all night long they jump backwards and forwards over the fences and vines, quarrel and sing canticles and leave their kittens there. The neighbours complained to her about the noise the cats made at night and one night her yard was full of old boots, rolling pins and broken crockery. When she cannot give away any more kittens, she sends Stepan to throw them over the cliff there. There should be quite a pile of little bones at the bottom!”
Charles had been talking softly, ignoring his wife’s anecdotes:
“…a ne’er-do-weel from the Tennessee mountains, oxycephalic, with a perpetually glazed and inflamed eye, a hard drinker, always tugging at one or other of us to kick over the traces and roam round the world with him (he had loafed round the world once on cattleboats and wool-ships). They had a child here. For a year Algie stagnated, doing some painting as they all do, even the blind and armless, here, staying in his wife’s skirts, eating and smoking up the allowance her father sent her, thinking she was at the Beaux-Arts. The summer came on and he ran a high fever. He went away. The wife and child ran up bills all over the village. The cottage was seized. Nina sold it a few weeks ago again to two women who call themselves “gentlewomen” from Wiltshire: they paid twenty thousand francs for it without seeing it, and came down here to paint. They can’t paint for nuts, but that’s all one. Now their income has failed and they have to go straight back home. The cottage is in the market again: that’s three times Nina’s sold it.”
Sophie began laughing heartily at her own reflections:
“The peasants say (they hate Nina because she bought their cabins cheap from them when the village was decaying and she made a lot of money on them, selling them to the artists), the peasants say that Nina has a can full of gros sous in her sitting-room, a sack of francs in her pantry, two-franc pieces in a box in the entry, ten-franc silver pieces in a bag made out of an old pair of breeches sewed up at the ends, in her bedroom, and a pot full of twenty-franc pieces in her closet. But she has a china vase containing two or three cinema tickets and a ten-franc piece in full view in the kitchen, where the back door is, coming from the garden, and a coarse soapstone clock, so that a burglar will steal those and look no farther in the house.”
Charles remarked,
“We had Giekine, an anarchist poet turned out of Belgrade, his native city, fifteen years ago, and living in misery in foreign lands ever since. He became a painter in Paris at the age of thirty-five under the encouragement of P. who incautiously told him he was a genius: that detestable word! He had his exhibition, and his manifesto, found two dozen or so sanguine patrons, and had a picture accepted by a man in the rue la Boétie. It was at this moment that the Nyiregyhazas invited him down here. He came as Nina’s guest, bringing with him an innocent, a girl of sixteen he found in a working-class family in the suburbs of Paris, who followed him like a lamb, without surprise, into unspeakable depravities. The Nyiregyhazas were induced to give him a thousand francs, taking in return a load of nightmarish canvases, as a speculation. Giekine went straight back to Paris by the night-train, taking the girl, and bought opium. When the couple had exhausted the cheap hotels (where they left their luggage in gage), the hospitals, relief-wards, soup-kitchens, the angels in cafés and the accidental suckers of the Montparnasse pavement, Giekine put his wife to work getting money, first from women to whom her sick childish face appealed, and then from men. Dying of hunger and craving, he began to haunt the homes of his old patrons and of the rich art-dealer of the rue la Boétie. They got so nervous at his aspect, as he crawled past them in the shadow of their familiar streets, with his drawn and burning face, that they complained to the police and he was deported. The girl, ill and deranged by misery, came down here and demanded Giekine’s pictures to sell:
the Nyiregyhazas refused, although they had discovered that the canvases had little value. She insulted them, made a great scandal and threw herself over the cliff. With the kittens.”
“He, he,” giggled Sophie: “that time Nina went to church every day for a week to pacify the peasants. Although she is far from being a Catholic she observes all the Catholic feasts and sends down gifts at Thanksgiving, in order to get in with the Cerfeuil.”
“With Nina, nothing is impossible,” continued Charles. “It appears she and Stepan went three times uninvited to garden-parties given by the Cerfeuil, the family living in the château. The Nyiregyhazas always stare at the château and the property, still unattainted by any mortgage, with uncontrollable longing: they stand in the middle of the street looking up, with their tongues hanging out. You can see them giving it side-glances, without thinking, while they are on other business. They love to paint, especially the château and its paddocks.”
Charles and his wife laughed. Sophie said,
“They go up to the Cerfeuil’s back door for the sake of getting a smell of the soil. They’d lick it off their boots if they were asked to, to get a bit of it. Whenever the peasants here see the Nyiregyhazas toiling up the path to the Cerfeuil, they say, ‘Now, what poppycock are they going to recount to Madame?’ and the cook or the gardener brings it down that afternoon, to the village, that the Nyiregyhazas went and asked Madame,—for her plumcake recipe, where the best pears grow for jam, on what day Easter falls next year, whether they could borrow an umbrella, where is the best veterinary surgeon, if she wanted a handsome Persian kitten, if she would like to accept a sketch Nina had just made of her orchard, if they could buy a chicken from Madame, whether she would graciously accept a signed copy of Stepan’s latest book, the one banned by the English censor. When they had the garden-parties up at the château, the Nyiregyhazas went up each time in their best city clothes, saying they had heard that “Madame had a few friends, and they hoped they were not intruding!” Each time Madame sent the maid to give them tea and toast in the kitchen and they did not even get a glance at the garden, or so much as put their nose in the big salon.”
Charles, suddenly grave, remarked sadly,
“That incident had the whole village tormented with a malicious and hungry joy for three months!”
Sophie said tartly,
“Charles, you know yourself that Madame told me. ‘Ah, how vulgar, how vulgar,’ she said: ‘wretched little mercenary folk, little upstart peasants,’ she called them to my ears.”
“Because Madame Cerfeuil has lost money and they have made it,” said Charles in his melancholy mood.
“Nina actually went up once to ask Madame Cerfeuil if she could collect cathartic mushrooms in the woods,” said Sophie, with sparkling eyes. “Stepan is dreadfully constipated, and Nina scours the country for purges, mushrooms, leguminous plants, flax and physic nuts which she always has in the house drying. She gives him stuff from the drugstore late at night, hot strong coffee in the morning and rhubarb at midday, and senna tea in the afternoon, even when guests are there, saying, ‘Stepan, remember your …’
“Sophie!” said Charles.
“Nina once became enamoured of a sawny young artist she met in Paris, that she brought down here. Stepan waited hourly for the young artist to do the deed, so that he could get rid of Nina (they say) and even sent himself an anonymous letter. The morning he got it, he had not the courage to go straight up to her with it, so he went out to walk on the hills: but, O dear, in the hills he felt very uncomfortable: he had to ease himself and the anonymous letter was no longer useful for the original end. The same day the young artist returned to Paris to meet his mother, and Stepan has never had another chance.”
“Stepan is good, lazy and sentimental,” said Charles: “he dreams of naiads bathing in a streak of moonlight, of sunlight playing on the golden flesh of virgins as they jump over tombstones in their innocent fun, of beautiful idiots lying with their hair loosened and their limbs flecked with blood, of passions in the cornfields and of brutal, bloody, mercenary, peasant tragedies. It was he who first thought of teaching the peasants their old crafts and restoring the village to prosperity. He does not understand the age he lives in at all.”
“Nina took the business in hand and made the peasants give her their urine, because she heard it dyes wool a better red,” said Sophie. “Stepan soon gave up all his schemes and let Nina run everything. He is a moochy cove, a maundering bard: he does not like to be in all these business deals, but she does most of the work and the money keeps him lilyhanded while he “creates”: and Nina’s piling up a small fortune.”
“They say,” said Sophie earnestly, “that once Nina looked for him all day, and ran all over the village with her bouncing trot, to the watchmaker’s, to the churchyard, to the hills, to the château, to all the cottages, calling across the empty pastures towards evening, ‘Stepan, Stepan!’ She began to cry at the end, the only time anyone saw her eyes moist. The artists laughed behind curtains thinking, ‘Perhaps the poor devil has given her the slip!’ Presently Nina had to satisfy a certain need: she had been so anxious all day that she had not had time to think about it before. She went to the proper place, could not get in, heard the key turn in the lock, and there found Stepan looking innocent and content. All day in the calm and cool of the little house he had escaped her, and thought about his girls and his bloody deeds. So they say, but it is really a wicked, malicious, little world down here, when it starts telling tales.”
Charles’ face twitched and he looked grey. He said apologetically,
“Those histories spring up here spontaneously: it is like the feverish, foul air of decay, or a loathsome deposit left by the old mountain lake that infects the air, a melancholy or ague which everyone of us gets eventually, even the best of us. All except the Nyiregyhazas: they like the place and they seem ignorant of the tales current: they only care about their business. They were born peasants and they understand the village from top to bottom. They are much more at home here than we are, wandering, uprooted, homeless, casteless people, always self-exiled, always looking for the little space that death leaves in this busy world: decay, our only comfort!”
Sophie went and sat beside Charles and took his hand. Her eyes were full of tears. “You don’t feel well again, Charlie?”
He put his hand on her knee and said,
“I’m all right, my love: I haven’t done enough work today, that’s all: and I’m disappointed about not being able to get the press yet from Paris. It puts all our dreams so much farther off in the distance.”
Holding her husband’s hand and looking at him from time to time, tenderly, Sophie went on clattering to us,
“They say Nina’s cat-hammed and potbellied, and that she wears black stockings and rose-coloured garters nevertheless. She is ridiculously affectionate to animals. She talks all day to five canaries, a castrated cat and a frilled lizard she has in the house. Stepan loathes animals. And as for Stepan, she looks after him like a baby: puts aromatic oils over him to keep him in good health, bathes him and powders him. He smells so sweet that the dogs and cows follow him in the fields!”
She went into shrieks of laughter without glancing at Charles sitting pale at her side.
“She has stencilled mottoes from Thoreau and William Morris round her ceilings, and every morning they repeat before breakfast three sayings from the Stoics!”
Charles looked at his wife kindly.
“I never heard such a clack-tongue and crackbrain as you, Sophie: won’t you give the poor Nyiregyhazas a rest?”
She answered cheerfully,
“I am a scandal-monger, I admit.”
“No, but it is quite true that Nina seems to have taught weaving to the whole village.”
Sophie blushed as we got up to leave. On the way up to the vantage-point where we were to watch the tightrope dancer’s feat, she opened her mouth two or three times, obviously on the point of recounting some other section of the incredib
le legend of the Nyiregyhazas, but she shut her mouth with a determined air and squeezed her husband’s fingers.
Before us the flat was sprinkled with people in holiday dress. The wire hung, incredibly delicate, between the hills. Standing on a rock was the daring tightrope walker in evening dress. The wedding party was disporting itself near us, the bridegroom fighting drunk, the bride tired and ready to cry. The tightrope dancer began his foolhardy trick; unable to look at him continuously, I glanced back at fair Doulcemer lying like a handful of seashells in a green rockpool. I recognised a square dot which must be Nina Nyiregyhaza and a round dot which I took for Stepan in his artist’s hat, where they stared up, standing stiff in the dotted village street, like two of the watchmaker’s little figures trotted out to tell the hour: they were absorbed by the phenomenon passing over their heads, the daring fellow, a mountebank skedaddling across the rent-free sky of Doulcemer: no doubt, it filled them with ineffable content to see this measureless sky which no-one could own, not even the Cerfeuil.
“Each one of us is like that,” said Charles, “balancing on as thin a cord between precipice and precipice.”
“It seems to me more like Doulcemer,” said Sophie, “suspended in the air precariously between its peaks. Scatter-brained colony doing a polka in thin air.”
At this moment the tight-rope performer put an end to all this bad poetry by plunging headfirst into the chasm and coming to rest, calm as could be, on the rocks at the bottom.
“He is very, very still,” said Charles thoughtfully: “he does not even know he fell.”
THE Architect now began, “We are without our Master; he is off conducting his little flock and there goes the Doctor of Medicine hurrying off to the concert without getting our thanks. We should be ashamed. Let us make some amends to the Viennese Conductor by honouring his office of Master and let us take revenge on the people who have deserted us, by telling a tale in their absence.”
The Salzburg Tales Page 14